Teen led and young narrator Wally, portrayed by rising talent Mia Isaac in Don’t Make Me Go, is just starting to consider the possibility that her father might not be there indefinitely when the unimaginable occurs.
John Cho’s character Max drives his daughter across the nation to a class reunion while pretending to be visiting friends in the melancholy road movie. However, Wally is unaware that the true reason they are travelling is so that her dad may see his ex-wife and Wally’s mother, who abandoned them both. He believes that her mother will be able to care for their child after he passes away because Max has been diagnosed with a terminal disease that requires surgery and has a dubious prognosis.
Max has kept his daughter in the dark about his illness and his decision to forgo treatment in order to spend his final year preparing her for life without him. The young teen’s first reaction, however, turns into a violent argument and a (small) fender bender when he tells Wally about it after having a difficult chat with her mother, before the two are finally pulled closer than they’ve ever been.
However, while Wally watches her father perform in the cozy lighting of a karaoke club, they are at their most in-tune with one another and their relationship takes a turn none of them anticipated, leading to Wally’s passing. The film’s heartbreaking twist—that Wally, like her father, also has an illness that takes her life unexpectedly—is made more difficult to watch because Vera Herbert’s script and both Cho and Isaac’s performances capture the distinct honesty, dependence, and love between single parents and their children.
“Max spends the whole film attempting to safeguard Wally and doing all in his power to ensure that she will be alright after his death. He thus believes that he will be able to shield her from life, according to Isaac. “I believe that the story’s main lesson is that you can’t always shield your kids from danger. Sometimes the only thing you can do is to just put up with them, help them through their experiences, and take lessons from them.
It’s a strong sequence that’s accentuated by a lot of the tenderness and comedy that make the rest of the movie so endearing. She witnesses her father having a blast on a karaoke stage just before Wally dies away. Marks dismisses Cho’s argument that the karaoke doesn’t have to be as nice because it’s karaoke by jokingly stating that she took the karaoke seriously. She remarks, “I was astonished that you believed that it would not be excellent because you are skilled.
